


take me back (to the night we met)

by Silence_Song



Category: Aldnoah.Zero (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not Beta Read, Pining, Post-Canon, Touch-Starved Slaine, it's more likely than you think, me? writing an a/z fanfic in 2020?, not as sad as the title suggests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25389943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silence_Song/pseuds/Silence_Song
Summary: In which Slaine and Inaho talk about the past and each other.
Relationships: Kaizuka Inaho/Slaine Troyard
Comments: 6
Kudos: 94





	take me back (to the night we met)

Slaine Troyard lives his life in segments. He calls this the waiting and it has been building for a year. Sometimes, he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, just that he is. He sits on a lawn chair in the back of the small home he shares with his enemy and he watches the sun rise and set, accompanied by cicadas and birdsong and their budding garden. Tonight, with the sunset a blur of amber and red, he is waiting to wake up. He breathes in the summer air, heavy with humidity and pollen and lies because this cannot last. Even if it isn’t a dream it can’t last. 

Someday, and someday soon, Inaho will grow tired of his silence, of his moods and his glares and he will return to the cell, shadowed by bars and unable to reach the sunlight, spilling tantalizingly close to the front of his prison. They will be back to one-sided chess and glass rooms and Slaine, again, will watch the meat deteriorate from his bones, and perhaps he will be glad for his wasting away. Because he is used to it, he knows what that feels like. This is an enigma. This is unfamiliar and strange, and it hurts him. 

Hurts him because the summer is so beautiful, and their home is only steps away from the vast ocean that haunts and calms him in equal measure. 

The door slides open behind him and he tilts his head, even though he’d know the shape of Inaho’s shade anywhere. They have spent the better half of the year winding around one another, just out of reach like ghosts unwilling to accept mortality or unable to move on, tethered to the corporeal for unfinished business or terror of the beyond. 

“Are you coming in for dinner? Your weight is down three pounds from last week.”

Slaine scoffs. Robotic. To the point. It grates on him. He wants Orange to get angry. He wants to be reprimanded for the things he’s done by someone other than himself and the guards in the prison. There has been no one he has wronged more than Kaizuka Inaho and yet, his enemy is the kindest to him. Though his kindness is relative. It is a quiet kind. It’s in the strawberries on the kitchen counter, the flowers in the garden, the books on birds and constellations, and the life forms beneath the waves of the deep blue ocean. It’s the ever-present eye that worries without realizing and it’s this question, spoken into the humid air and the aftermath of a day spent away from one another. Separated once more by emotions Slaine can’t help but feel and emotions that Inaho does not feel, not in the way that Slaine does. 

“No, I think I’ll go to bed.” He adds, “Orange,” as an afterthought, a placating gesture. He feels the shift of Inaho’s frown, and he turns to look over his shoulder. Inaho stands barefoot in his apron, a vampire bat with too large fangs stitched onto the front pocket, holding a spatula, and wearing his ever-present eyepatch and a frown that creases his forehead gently. “You look ridiculous,” says Slaine. 

Inaho looks down at himself. “I was cooking,” he replies as if it clears up everything. 

Slaine rolls his eyes. “Thought _I_ was the bat,” he mumbles. 

Inaho nods. “Yes, that’s why I bought it. Because it reminded me of you.” 

The tips of Slaine’s ears go red. He stands. “You know I hate it when you say things like that,” he mutters, brushing past the other into the cooler house. 

“I know,” replies Inaho and Slaine feels the subtle shift of his emotions. 

_Smug bastard_ , he thinks, crossing by the kitchen to get to his room. Pancakes sit on a plate on the counter and atop them sit the strawberries from the day before. He pauses and pulls a face at Inaho. “What are you doing?” he asks. 

Inaho blinks. “I don’t know what you mean.” His voice is innocent enough, but Slaine knows he’s smarter than this. Inaho knows exactly what this means: making something he _knows_ Slaine enjoys on a day that Slaine has been particularly prickly- 

“Is this some sort of weird Inaho apology?” Slaine asks. 

Inaho gestures to the plate. “Take as many as you want.” 

Slaine does, but only because Inaho went through the work to make them, not because he’s hungry. They don’t talk through dinner and it’s normal, even though Slaine feels Inaho’s eye flickering to him now and again. Inaho does the dishes and Slaine retreats to his room, where he closes the door and sits on his bed, staring at the bookshelf where the books sit and where, beside them, is a small bat plush. Another gift courtesy of Inaho, probably meant to irritate Slaine but he - begrudgingly - finds it endearing. It’s got large eyes and small velvet wings. It brings comfort when he wakes from nightmares, tears on his cheeks, and scars burning. 

He shakes his head and lays down to rest, staring out the window he leaves open. The sea breeze ruffles the blonde hair on his brow, and he breathes in the salt on it, finding a small smile on his lips as he drifts off. 

Sleep, however, never stays for long, even now. Tonight, he sees Saazbaum with skin mottled by burns and puss and white, unseeing eyes, reaching out with a long skeletal hand to remind him that he _failed._ He sees Asseylum with the gun leveled at his head, the hurt in her endless blue gaze. He sees her body slump, the splatter of blood--

He wakes with a cry, the sharp crack of a whip echoing through his waking state. He touches his forehead, where his hair is slick with cold sweat and he closes his eyes as he presses himself against his knees. The door opens and he bites down on his lip. “Don’t you ever learn to knock, Orange?” The bed dips when Inaho sits. Slaine lifts his eyes and rubs his wrist viciously across them. “Sorry if I woke you.” He pushes it out before looking away. Inaho’s gaze is too intense. 

“You’ve been having nightmares since we got here,” Inaho remarks. 

“Yes, Inaho. I’m aware.” They’re silent. Inaho staring at him, Slaine staring at anything but, trying to blink away the leftover emotion. “Don’t you ever have dreams?” he demands, wanting to sound vicious, wanting to lash out, but he just ends up sounding tired but stern. 

Inaho nods. “You seem to think I’m not human. Of course, I dream.” 

“What do you dream about?” For all the prying Inaho knowingly or unknowingly does, Slaine believes he is allowed this once attempt at learning something about his captor. 

The brunette looks down at his hands. “Sometimes I dream about my childhood, the kids in my neighborhood were never kind. Other times I dream about Asseylum and a friend I lost at the start of the war.”

The look on his face is strangely humanizing. It’s open in the only way Inaho can be open. There is a spark of emotion in the depth of his amber gaze and Slaine almost wants to recoil from it. 

Inaho glances up and Slaine is ensnared. Inaho says, “Sometimes I dream about you.” 

Slaine’s breath catches. Inaho is silhouetted by the moon, the light rimming his hair like a halo. It softens his usually withering stares and smooths the lines of his face. “Me?” Slaine asks, voice hoarse. “What about me?” He doesn’t know if he wants Inaho to tell him. 

For a moment too long, Inaho is silent, as if those dreams are a secret to him and he is warring with himself to reveal them to Slaine - even if Slaine thinks he has a right to know, considering he’s a prominent member in them. Inaho breaks his silence by saying, “I dream about when we met. How I was wrong. You got hurt for what I did.” 

Now, Slaine does recoil. “I never thought I’d hear you admit you were wrong.” 

“Why? It is a good quality to have.” 

Slaine scoffs, reorients, and replays those words in his head. _You got hurt for what I did._ “How did you know that? That I was hurt.” 

“The guards at the prison have mentioned that you have scars,” he says and Slaine flinches. Of course. But, Inaho continues, “I have not seen them myself. I also figured it was a possible reaction on the Martian’s part. You betrayed them both by helping us and looking for Princess Asseylum in the first place.”

“Then why did you shoot me down if you thought, somewhere in that head of yours, that I could be tortured or worse for what I did?” 

Inaho meets his gaze. “I was not thinking. It was a reckless choice, one that I’m not proud of. Can you forgive me?” 

It comes out of nowhere and Slaine laughs. “ _Me_ forgive _you_?” he repeats, shaking his head. But Inaho means it, he can see it on the brunette’s face. “Orange, for someone who knows so much, you’re really stupid sometimes.” Inaho’s brows crease. Slaine sighs. “I would have made the same choice. Have made similar choices. There’s nothing to forgive.” 

“It is one of the things that I wish I could go back and change,” says Inaho. His voice has fallen softer, but their gazes remain locked. 

Slaine is the first to look away. Out to the stars twinkling across the night sky. “What would it have mattered?” 

“We might have gotten here much sooner,” Inaho says. “We might be different people now.” 

“You mean I might never have shot you,” says Slaine. His fingers tighten on his clothes. He too is ashamed. There are choices he wishes he could relive, but he knows things like that don’t exist. These choices they’ve made are set in stone and while they may try to dance around them, the scars will always remain, whether they are physical or mental. 

“You always think I care so much about this-” 

“ _I shot you in the eye, Inaho!_ I could have killed you.” 

“Would that have bothered you?” 

Slaine flinches. “Yes, I’m not a monster-” Even as he says it, he feels himself shrink. Because he _is_. To most of the world, he is a monster. He’s the man that took so much from them and theirs. To Inaho he may be a lonely boy in a glass box suffocating on the force of his sobs, but to everyone else, he is the would-be emperor of Vers and the would-be destroyer of Earth. 

“I do not think you’re a monster.” 

Slaine closes his eyes. “You can’t just say things like that,” he whispers. 

“Why not?” Inaho sounds genuinely curious. 

“Because you know what I’ve done.” 

“Shouldn’t it be more powerful coming from me, then? Despite your crimes, I do not think you’re a monster.” 

Slaine can’t catch his breath. He feels like he’s drowning again, but for the life of him, he can’t push Inaho away, can’t ask him to leave the room because even though he’s suffocating, Inaho is a breath of fresh air. Inaho is honest and steady and Slaine, although stuck in the waiting and the wondering, doesn’t want to let go. He wants to say something, and usually, he can, usually, he has words to throw back, quips to use as shields, but now all he has is his breath, curling in and out of him, and Inaho’s burning one-eyed look. “Orange,” he says and there is a certain feeling in his voice that’s never been there, or perhaps has been there throughout this year, but he never noticed. 

Inaho kisses him. Or maybe he kisses Inaho. Or maybe they kiss each other. The details become unimportant the moment they meet. Inaho’s lips are soft and gentle and Slaine feels like he has been falling until this exact moment. The world comes to a screeching halt and all he cares about is this: 

Inaho’s warm hand on his neck. Inaho’s lips pushing back against his. Inaho’s hair curling in between his fingers. The soft puffs of their breath when they part, hanging, suspended, centimeters away from one another. Slaine moves forward again, desperately seeking out the warmth as it’s fading. Their lips ghost together and Slaine thinks he feels Inaho smile before he’s lost once more in the intoxicating pull between them, lost to the need to be closer and closer still. To be needed in return. 

Inaho pushes him back against the pillows, one hand falling against the curve of his hip, the other at his cheek. Slaine rises back up just a bit to stay connected to him, his arms locked around his neck, to kiss him even as his lungs scream. When they break apart, they’re both breathless and Slaine’s face is on fire. Inaho’s brow arches above him and Slaine shoves him off with a muttered curse of his name and Inaho’s responding laughter is not vocal, but Slaine can see it in the sparks of his eye. 

They lay side by side in the moonlight, Inaho’s hand still on his waist. “Where did you learn to kiss like that?” Slaine teases. 

Inaho shakes his head. “I’ve never kissed anyone before.” 

Slaine pulls a face and hates him for a millisecond. Does he have to be good at everything? 

Inaho says, “Neither have you, apparently.” 

Slaine hits him with a spare pillow. “Orange!” 

“I didn’t say it was bad.” 

“You implied it!” 

Inaho shrugs. 

Slaine hates him a little more but finds it easy to let it go the moment he gets lost in the other’s remaining eye. He reaches up, traces the edge of the eyepatch as the humor drains for him. “Does it hurt?” 

“Only sometimes.” 

Slaine winces. Inaho shifts closer, tangling his ankle around Slaine’s and pulling him closer. His fingers ghost across the raised scars across Slaine’s back. “Do they hurt?” 

Slaine’s laugh is a puff of air that flares his nostrils. “Only sometimes,” he quotes. 

Inaho takes that answer and tightens the arm around his waist. 

“Are you planning on staying all night?” Slaine accuses, hand against the other boy’s chest to pull a face at him. 

“Yes.” 

Slaine goes, with a groan, when the other tugs him closer, pressing his nose into the juncture of Inaho’s neck. “You’re insufferable.” 

“Do you want me to leave?” 

Slaine listens to his breathing, feels the exhale scatter a few strands of his hair and the warmth of Inaho’s fingers through his shirt. He feels his eyelids growing heavy, encased in the other’s safety. “No,” he whispers. 

As he drifts off, the feeling of waiting drifts away too, and when he wakes, he finds himself still curled against Kaizuka Inaho with the feeling of freedom rising inside him. 

**Author's Note:**

> hello this hit me out of no where. idk if inaho feels in character or not, it's been a hot second since i've watched a/z but i still love them with my whole heart and soul. love them with me?
> 
> also name a more cliche song to write a fic to-


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